Sony will bolster its mobile range with a large screen “phablet” phone that is sized neatly between the high end smartphone and tablet launched last year to revive the Japanese group’s ailing devices business.

At 6.4 inches, Xperia Z Ultra acts perfectly as a small video screen, with a remarkably clear luminous display that carries HD videos with great clarity using Sony Bravia TV technology. Read more

Sony, you big tease. Taking a leaf from Apple’s playbook, the Japanese electronics group has posted a page on its website suggesting that a new Playstation games console is in the offing for 2013.

Sony Computer Entertainment put a page on its website titled Playstation 2013 with a video trailing a mysterious event on February 20 in New York. The page invites users to register for updates and ‘be the first to know’. Read more

Interesting commentary from around the Web on the tech story that made headlines this week.

The curtain came down on the International Consumer Electronic Show on Friday, bringing an end to the largest event in its history. As expected, the Las Vegas show was filled with TVs,smartphones and computers. But despite the acres of print and online space given to covering the show, there has been no shortage of tech commentators questioning its continued relevance. Read more

Sony is calling its new smartphone, launched at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, a ‘super phone’, winding the clock back to the time of super models, super cars and when the Japanese group ruled the high-end electronics market. Daniel Thomas, telecoms correspondent, says the device is grown-up but far from revolutionary.

The choices are blurring for consumers looking for a mobile device. While tablets are still popular, laptop screens and keyboards are being separated and recombined in new ways. Hybrid machines from Lenovo and Sony, using Microsoft’s Windows 8, give the indecisive a – somewhat unsatisfying – taste of both.

AT&T has launched two smartphones licensed to kill the opposition with their specifications.

I felt rather like Q, 007’s gadget meister, in testing the Sony Xperia TL (a.k.a. the Bond phone), and the LG Optimus G quad-core, LTE smartphone, available since November 2 for $100 and $200 respectively with their two-year contracts. Read more

Behind every daredevil stunt or eye-popping event of late, a pint-sized point-of-view camera costing a few hundred dollars has been there to capture the moment through the eyes of the performer.

And, until a new thrust by Sony into a booming category, behind every “action cam” there has been a maverick entrepreneur pursuing a dream, which in the case of GoPro could lead to a $500m reported IPO next year. Read more

HP, Lenovo, Samsung, Sony and Toshiba have been showing the shape of Windows 8 computing to come, unveiling hybrid PC/tablet devices that take advantage of the new dual-mode operating system when it launches on October 26.

HP has been demonstrating its Envy x2 (pictured left) to media in San Francisco, while its Asian rivals launched their takes on hybrid computing at the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin. None of them have anything to fear from Apple in this area, in terms of patent disputes or rival devices, with Tim Cook, chief executive, describing such designs as being as unsatisfactory as combining a toaster with a refrigerator. Read more

It has not been a great week for Sony employees, as the Japanese consumer electronics group carries out some late-summer pruning on its businesses. Around 1,000 people at Sony Mobile’s operations are to be let go, with two-thirds of the redundancies falling in Lund, Sweden, as the headquarters of the mobile phone unit moves to Japan.

This was widely expected after Sony bought out Ericsson from their Sony Ericsson joint venture last year. In April this year, Sony had announced plans to cut 10,000 jobs globally. About half of these would come from the sale and spin-off of two subsidiaries, but detail about the rest is just starting to trickle through. Read more

A major investor in Gaikai, the cloud gaming service bought by Sony for $380m last week, has said the console maker could do something revolutionary with its acquisition that would transcend its hardware business.

Archive

About the authors

Richard Waters has headed the FT's San Francisco bureau since 2002 and covers Google and Microsoft, among other things. A former New York bureau chief for the FT, he is intrigued by Silicon Valley's unique financial and business culture, and is looking forward to covering his second Tech Bust.

Chris Nuttall has been online and messing around with computers for more than 20 years. He reported from the FT's San Francisco bureau on semiconductors, video games, consumer electronics and all things interwebby from 2004 to 2013, before returning to London.

Tim Bradshaw is the FT's digital media correspondent, and has just moved from London to join our team in San Francisco. He has covered start-ups such as Twitter and Spotify, as well as the online ambitions of more established media companies, such as the BBC iPlayer. He also covers the advertising, marketing and video-game industries. Tim has been writing about technology, business and finance since 2003.

Robert Cookson is the FT's digital media correspondent in London. He
covers digital enterprise in media, from the music industry to local newspapers and social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. A former Hong Kong markets correspondent, he is interested in the interplay
between old media and new technologies.

Hannah Kuchler writes about technology and Silicon Valley from the FT's San Francisco bureau. She covers social media including Facebook and Twitter and the dark and mysterious world of cybersecurity. Hannah has worked for the FT in London, Hong Kong and New York, reporting on everything from British politics to the Chinese internet.

Sarah Mishkin in a correspondent in San Francisco, where she covers payments, e-commerce, and political news on the West Coast. Prior to California, she has worked as an FT reporter in New York, London, Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong, and most recently in Taiwan, where she covered Chinese internet companies, semiconductors, and tech supply chains.